Giacomo Grasso

Enrichment plants are designed to increase natural uranium 235-isotope content (the most valuable, since the term "enrichment") for use in nuclear reactors or weapons. They can operate by several processes, either physical or chemical, the most common of which are the gaseous diffusion and the gas centrifuge.

The use of COSI is quite complex since the high number of details to be specified in input phase. A short introduction to COSI6 is therefore here presented to simplify the approach to a new user, as also to clarify the routine usage for an expert one, filling the gaps in the existing documentation.

This work is intended to confirm the preliminary results of the European Facility for Industrial Transmutation (EFIT) fuel cycle obtained by ENEA with the deterministic ERANOS transport code in the framework of the neutronic design of an European Transmutator Demonstrator (EDT). The Beginning Of Life (BOL), Beginning Of Cycle (BOC) and End Of Cycle (EOC) configurations have been studied with the Monte Carlo MCNP5 code for criticality calculations, using the equivalent material compositions relative to a uniform 0-, 1- and 2-years whole burnt fuel respectively.

The National Agency for the New Technologies, Energy and Environment (ENEA) has started a participation with other OECD/NEA (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Nuclear Energy Agency) members within the Working Party on Scientific Issues of the Fuel Cycle (WPFC) since March 2007, to take aim at participating to the studies about national and regional scenarios of nuclear fuel cycle management. In order to begin the participation within theWPFC, an initial set-up phase has been run for the benchmark of the operative capabilities of scenarios calculations in ENEA. The benchmark cases (identified and proposed by the WPFC) have then been analyzed with the COSI6 code, and the results will be presented in Cadarache on September, 14th 2007.